I COME FROM A FAMILY OF DREAMERS.
My grandfather bought the land in Vermont, the place that would define my family and my upbringing, in the early 1960s. It was almost a thousand acres, mostly mountaintop, with a few dilapidated farmhouses and outbuildings. Much of it had been worked as dairy farms for more than a century before my family arrived, and because it had been grazed by cows for so many decades, it was still full of high green meadows and clear, breathtaking views into the valleys below.
My grandfather had originally intended to build a country house there, in the style of homes he had admired when he lived and worked in Austria and Switzerland—a grand, chalet-style place where his four children, who had grown up mostly apart, in separate boarding schools, could spend their summers. He longed to be the head of a large, close family at least in part, I believe, to make up for what he thought was missing from his own upbringing. His childhood had come apart when he was a little boy, when his father died and his mother remarried, and he was sent away to live with relatives. While he had become very successful financially and now had a family of his own, they still did not have a singular place to call home. His was a grand and ambitious vision of a place where they would become close and be together for generations to come. His children, however, had other plans, largely inspired by the political and cultural shifts of that era. Instead, it became a place where each of them would stake a claim, two as permanent residents and two as itinerant, seasonal visitors, each by then so independently formed, so formal and competitive with one another, that there was little hope that they would ever develop the sort of bonds that my grandfather had longed for. It was a place, dramatic and vast, remote and private, and a time, tumultuous and inspired, where anything could be imagined.
My mother and father were married in 1969, and moved into one of the old farmhouses while building their own geodesic dome on the hillside site they had been given as a wedding gift. In an old cowshed next to the house, they kept a herd of five goats, including a big white dam named Cassie who produced such amazing amounts of milk that she won blue ribbons at state fairs. A neighboring farmer gave her to my parents because he couldn't keep her out of his gardens, even when he surrounded them with barbed wire. One morning, he was so angry that he put her in the back of his truck and drove her to my parents, who had just learned that they were expecting twins. My sister and I were born in November, during a blizzard. When we were just six weeks old my mother, exhausted from nursing two babies, closed her bedroom door for three days and slept. My father, having no access to or money for formula, filled glass baby bottles with milk from Cassie's udders. Cassie's diet was grass in the summer and hay in the winter, cut from the fields around us that were not planted, but left to grow thick with weeds, wild-flowers, goldenrod, and ragweed.
My first food, then, was made of this place—of weeds and of dreams.
